One of the primary methods of gathering evidence in litigation is through the use of depositions. A deposition is a witness' testimony under oath and is typically recorded in a transcript by a court reporter. The deposition transcript is read and analyzed by those in the legal profession to assist in the litigation process and prepare for a trial. During a trial, the testimony of multiple witnesses may be recorded in a trial transcript of the court proceedings. This trial transcript may then be read and analyzed by lawyers to prepare for post-trial motions or an appeal.
There are a number of available systems which attempt to assist lawyers, and others in the legal profession, with the analysis and management of deposition and trial transcripts. A typical system will allow full-text searching, meaning that a user may search all words in a transcript for any locations of a particular word. This is accomplished either by a brute force method of searching the transcript word by word or with the use of an index of all words in the transcript.
However, full-text searching, or searching through raw text, is of limited effectiveness in retrieving relevant and useful information from a database. Therefore, when a database merely consists of the raw text of a transcript, the computer-based system interacting with the database is not using the full power of the computer. This type of system is thus of only limited use in assisting the lawyer with the analysis of a transcript or other document.
Full-text searching has at least the following limitations which may affect the analysis of text. Most words have synonyms or near-synonyms that a user may not realize are used in the text. Since full-text searching only searches for the exact character string entered by a user, it will not locate any synonyms and relevant information could be missed. This same limitation is present in the case of misspellings of a word or even correct variations in the spelling of a word. Some systems attempt to allow for this situation by providing the capability of multiple queries or searching for a partial word (wildcard search). A partial word search allows a system to search for all occurrences of words that begin with a particular character string (root). Even with partial word searches, however, there are limitations because a partial word search usually generates irrelevant occurrences of all words of which the search characters are the root. Finally, full-text searching tends to recall only a small fraction of relevant information in the text and usually also recalls much irrelevant information.
Other systems allow the user to perform what is known in the industry as issue coding. As the user works through the transcript, the user may assign codes to certain portions of the transcript, and each unique code represents an issue of fact or law. Issue codes are typically used because a witness will typically not use the actual words of the issue in their testimony. For example, in a personal injury suit, one of the issues may be contributory negligence. The witness will never actually say "contributory negligence," but the witness' testimony may be relevant to that issue and thus provide support necessary to prove that issue.
In order to provide for this situation, a system may allow the user to assign a certain code to each portion of the transcript that relates to an issue such as contributory negligence. In such a system, the user could assign a "contributory negligence" code at every place in the transcript that the user believes is relevant to that issue. The system may then search the transcript for each of these issue codes and report the occurrences of an issue code. This type of system is also of limited effectiveness in managing a text database. There are no associations between an issue code assigned to one part of a transcript and the same issue code assigned to another part of the transcript. Changing an issue code at one location in the transcript will have no effect on the same issue code at other locations in the text. These issue codes are simply like another word in the text, and searching for issue codes is similar to full-text searching. The limitations of full-text searching are again present in issue coding.
Other systems also have limitations in the ability to manage exhibits or items referenced in the text. These systems typically handle exhibits by having the user enter words into the text, similar to issue codes, in order to identify the location of a reference to an item. This type of system does not have the ability to, for example, track exhibits across multiple transcripts. Therefore, with this type of system, there is no correlation between an exhibit referenced in one transcript and the same exhibit referenced in another transcript. The management of exhibits is also limited in full-text searching. Full-text searching does not have the ability to reference items external to the text such as exhibits, or non-text items in the text such as graphs or diagrams.
There is thus a need for a complex and sophisticated system for managing and analyzing the text contained in a document. For example, there is a need for this type of system in the legal profession in order to have a more powerful tool for analyzing transcripts and assisting in litigation.